The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
‘Wherever you land, a fine dinner awaits’
ferry gateways spanning more than 400 miles ( see p16) invite Britons to explore France’s Channel coast and hinterland. For us, it’s not the Bleak North, but a place rich in history and beauty with slightly better weather and much better catering. The battlefields and cathedrals are compelling, the beaches seductive. Temperate northern France suits an active holiday, walking the cliffs or cycling the hills and valleys. The weather and landscape are also ideal for golf, with fine courses all along the coast.
France clings to its regionalism, and variety adds spice to exploring, eating and drinking. Brittany and Normandy are as different as crab and cheese, as are Picardy and Flanders. Wherever you land, a fine dinner awaits. That’s the point of going to France, isn’t it? pilgrimage, in fact, and Le Mont Saint-Michel, the abbey-crowned granite island at the mouth of the Couesnon that marks the boundary between Brittany and Normandy, makes a good target for a long walk, whether religious or not. As an act of faith, few walks compare with the traditional approach to the abbey, following a guide through the shallows and over the shifting sandbanks of the Bay of Mont Saint-Michel from the
Bec d’Andaine, ⅔ mile north of Genêts on the GR223 coastal footpath.
British pilgrims of old landed at Barfleur and followed the “Voie aux Anglais”. It’s still viable, but the GR223 from Cherbourg would be my heathen choice: 160 miles to Genêts. An hour’s bus ride from Cherbourg to Barneville-Carteret cuts that to
100 miles but misses out the best stretch of coast, around the Cotentin’s northern tip. For the guided walk across the Bay of Mont Saint-Michel, see ville-genets.com/fr/tourisme/ traversees-randonnees-en-baie.html. The adventure is not compulsory; you can stick to terra firma, adding
25 miles to the walk, or take the train from Folligny (near Granville) to Mont Saint-Michel’s local station, Pontorson.
As for Brittany, the coast is your oyster. The old Sentier des Douaniers (customs officers’ path), the GR34, follows it for more than 1,100 miles from Mont Saint-Michel almost to the mouth of the Loire, posing more questions than it answers unless you have the entire summer. The two most famously scenic stretches are the Pink Granite Coast around Lannion and the Emerald Coast around Saint-Malo. Self-guided walking holidays in both sectors, with luggage transfers between overnight stops, are offered by tour operators including Headwater (headwater.com) and Inntravel (inntravel. co.uk). Doing it yourself, driving or using public transport, is harder on the legs but not difficult. For Pink Granite, Morlaix to Perros-Guirec would fill a strenuous week (100 miles, with hills); a circuit from Lannion would be easier. For the Emerald Coast, you can walk from Saint-Malo to Mont Saint-Michel (45 miles) in a long weekend. You can find the hotels we recommend in Normandy (telegraph. co.uk/ttNormandyhotels) and Brittany (telegraph.co.uk/ tt-brittanyhotels) on the Telegraph Travel website. Any walking holiday has a spiritual dimension: a renunciation of trappings in favour of simplicity. Something of a London to Paris is an obvious cycling idea, and a good one – on the French side of the channel, at least. Dieppe is the starting point for the French section of the Avenue Verte, which follows minor roads and car-free voies vertes for 150 miles through green and pleasant parts of Normandy and the Île de France, with few steep hills. The website cycle.travel/route/avenue_ verte_france is packed with details, maps and good advice. Alternatively, Sustrans publishes a guide to the entire Avenue Verte, detailing alternative routes/diversions.
The cyclist in a hurry could reduce the length of the ride by a third, to
100 miles (two days, for most of us) by following the most direct minor roads rather than the Avenue Verte. From Pontoise I would consider taking the bike into Paris on the RER train (permissible outside rush hour). Returning to Dieppe by train from Gare Saint-Lazare takes two hours via Rouen. Longer but no less tempting, La Véloscénie (Veloscenic in English) covers 280 miles from Paris to
Mont Saint-Michel via Versailles, Rambouillet and Chartres, with mostly gentle gradients on minor roads and cycle tracks. Pedalling on to SaintMalo extends the ride to 310 miles: achievable in a week, with time for sightseeing. The website veloscenic. com and a new English route guide published by Excellent Books present it as conceived (by Parisians) as heading west from Notre Dame. For a better chance of wind assistance, I would be tempted to do the trip in reverse, starting at St Malo.
Brittany has done as much as any region to tempt the cyclist with family-friendly voie vertes and long-haul véloroutes including a complex Tour de Manche itinerary linking Cherbourg, St Malo and Roscoff and a route through southern England between Plymouth and Poole, with variants including the Channel Islands. The Breton part of the Vélodyssée Mont SaintMichel, main, is an unforgettable sight. Hardelot, below, offers great golf. Right: Belon oysters (velodyssey.com) is car-free almost all the way. Starting from Roscoff, it’s 170 miles through the inland hills and along the towpaths of the Brest to Nantes canal as far as Redon (add 70 miles to continue to Nantes), returning by train via Rennes to Saint-Malo or Roscoff. Home Counties golfers have been crossing the Channel for a burst of tip-top golf and good living at Le Touquet since the days of the roll-on roll-off air shuttle from Lydd, and beyond. Barely an hour from